Reading Round Up Part 1 - The 'Tecs.

 It must seem that I haven't got very far with the pile of books I designated as holiday reading back at the end of December since they haven't been mentioned much - bar Stone Blind which I reviewed enthusiastically in January and the book on Egon Schiele. I have however read several more of them and another couple of 'off pile' ones too, so here goes with the crime ones. 

Basically this means the trio of Sophie Hannah's Poirot novels from the pile plus a random Ann Cleeves. Not quite random enough as it turned out; I bought it at he airport on the way to Funchal and I hadn't got very far into it before I realised I had read it before. On the upside, although I remembered characters I didn't remember the plot. This is it

I probably enjoyed it more this time around to be honest as I am more appreciative of Cleeves' ability to conjure up atmosphere and place these days, whereas previously I read detective novels purely for the plot and the characters and found what I would then have called 'boring superfluous description' - well, boring and superfluous. It's a Vera Stanhope novel, the second of the series and perhaps if I'm ever really stumped for something to read I should revisit more of them; as I've mentioned before they've never been a favourite but perhaps I was missing something. 

The only thing I was missing with the Sophie Hannah Poirots was the reason why (almost) everyone raves about them. They were pretty dreadful. I didn't review them one by one because having read the first one and not enjoyed it very much, I thought I would wait until I had read the others because sometimes it takes writers a while to get into a new series and they improve as time goes by.  These did not improve. The main faults I found were the same as I found with Hannah's own novels; over complicated plots, to the point of them becoming simply non-credible, and very weak characterisation. You might think that the latter fault wouldn't really matter in a pastiche Poirot since Christie is often lambasted for ignoring character in favour of plot, but Christie was a better writer of character than she is often given credit for. OK, maybe a lot of the people in her novels were stereotypical, but they were credible stereotypes, and there is a reason that stereotypes exist ....

The plot in the first one was ludicrous, and there were so many wrong solutions offered that I can't remember who actually was responsible for the crime. The second one had a character with Victim hanging over his head like a red flag from the word go. I can't remember who killed him, and I don't really care. The third one stretched my credulity rather further than it was willing to go and had a truly cop out ending. 

Rather than send these to the charity shop I have donated them to the library so that lots of people can have access to them, rather than just a solitary purchaser in a charity shop. They are very highly thought of and were critically well reviewed when they came out, so maybe it's me. But given all the wonderful crime writers that  are currently out there  I think Hannah was an odd choice by the Christie Estate to write these.